A One Night Stand You Won’t Forget

A musical chord. A voice. A lyric.

There is something spectacular when these things come together on stage. It is the melting pot of the creative process, which sometimes takes months, years, if not decades to perfect as creative teams toil for the perfect harmonies or audition hundreds of actors for a single role.

The 24 Hour Musicals crams this entire process into a day. Produced by The Exchange in association with The 24 Hour Company as a benefit for the Orchard Project, an initiative that funds artistic development for an array of international theater companies and artists, the event was captured on film in the form of a 90-minute documentary, “One Night Stand.”

Fathom Events, known for its live HD streaming of the Metropolitan Opera, showcased the film on Jan. 30 in movie theaters across the country. Actors from theater, film and television including Cheyenne Jackson, Rachel Dratch, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Richard Kind, among others, threw inhibition aside to perform 20-minute musicals that had literally been written the night before.

Lesson to be learned: it’s not easy. The film captures many facets of the creative process, but most of all humility. From toiling composers throwing up in the middle of the night to Dratch’s deer-caught-in-headlights expression, the vulnerability of exposing one’s talents to a room full of strangers is palpable.

While it would be impossible to show all four of the 20-minute musicals in their entirety, the choppy editing of the actual performances may leave you wondering if the final product turned out to be coherent.